Book I

The first book of the Confessions is devoted primarily to an analysis of
Augustine's life as a child, from his infancy (which he cannot recall and must
reconstruct) up through his days as a schoolboy in Thagaste (in Eastern
Algeria). Wasting no time in getting to the philosophical content of his
autobiography, Augustine's account of his early years leads him to reflect on
human origin, will and desire, language, and memory.

[I.1-3] Augustine begins each Book of the Confessions with a
prayer in praise of God, but Book I has a particularly extensive invocation.
The first question raised in this invocation concerns how one can seek God
without yet knowing what he is. In other words, how can we look for something
if we don't know exactly what we're looking for? The imperfect answer, at least
for now, is simply to have faith--if we seek God at all, he will reveal himself
to us.

[I.4-6] Nonetheless, Augustine launches immediately into a highly
rhetorical (and relatively brief) discussion of God's attributes. Asking God to
"come into me," Augustine then questions what that phrase could possibly mean
when addressed to God. The heart of this dilemma, which will turn out later to
be one of the final stumbling blocks to Augustine's conversion (see Books VI and
VII), is that God seems both to transcend everything and to be within
everything. In either case, it doesn't make precise sense to ask him to "come
into" Augustine.

God cannot be contained by what he created, so he can't "come to" Augustine in
any literal sense. At the same time, God is the necessary condition for the
existence of anything, so he's "within" Augustine already (so again it makes no
sense to ask him to "come into me"). Further, God is not "in" everything in
amounts or proportions--small pieces of the world don't have any less of God
than big ones.

Having hurriedly discredited the idea of God as any sort of bounded, mobile,
or divisible being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply Neoplatonic
statement on the question of "where" God is: "In filling all things, you fill
them all with the whole of yourself."

Augustine then rephrases his question about God's nature, asking "who are
you then, my God?" This rather direct approach generates a litany of metaphors
concerning God, taken partly from scripture and partly from Augustine's own
considerations. Examples include: "most high...deeply hidden yet most
intimately present...you are wrathful and remain tranquil...you pay off debts,
though owing nothing to anyone...." This list is rhetorical rather than
analytic, and develops no coherent argument about God--it just introduces
the mysteries of the subject.